Kemper's Reviews > Countdown City

I am a weak and cowardly person so if I knew that he world was about to end, I’d probably spend my final moments just crying, cursing the universe and generally acting like Bill Paxton in Aliens. "Game over, man! Game over!"

Hank Palace is better man than I am, or at least he’s able to divert himself from the upcoming apocalypse by playing detective. In The Last Policeman, Earth had learned that a giant asteroid was coming to send humanity out the same way the dinosaurs bought it. Hank was a young police officer in New Hampshire who had gotten promoted when large numbers of cops had wandered away to go ‘bucket list’. Law and order were being maintained by automatic jail sentences that would put anyone in a cell into the end of the world, but there were serious cracks starting to appear in society.

Countdown City picks up Hank’s story with only 77 days left before the asteroid hits, and the decline of civilization has accelerated. Hank and the other detectives have all been fired as the police are only being used as a show of force on the streets to keep things from falling totally apart. An old friend contacts Hank to ask him to find her husband Brett who has gone missing. With everyone going bucket list to spend their final days fulfilling their dreams, it would seem that Brett just took as so many others have, but Brett was a former state policeman known for his honorable nature so abandoning his wife doesn't seem like his style. Hank is also worried about his sister Nico who has gotten involved with a fringe radical group that thinks there’s some vast government conspiracy involving the asteroid.

The Last Policemen had a great concept, but I found Hank kind of irritating. It’s obvious that since being a detective had always been his dream that he was fulfilling his own bucket list by playing cop, and his rule-abiding nature seemed silly with the end near. Plus, he appeared to have no self-awareness or guilt about how his actions wasted the precious time of others or caused them even worse repercussions. It wasn’t really clear if Winters was trying to portray Hank as a hero doing his job until the bitter end or if he was meant to be seen as this desperate guy using a murder investigation to avoid dealing with what was coming.

That comes more into focus in Countdown City because Hank has no authority. He can only waste his own time, and if that’s how he chooses to spend the last days, then so be it. Plus, he gets called out multiple time by others who question the idea of chasing a missing husband when the world is going to end in less than 3 months. Even though Hank continues to push things long past a point when most of us would in similar circumstances, he comes across as more tragic and helpless to resist his impulse to find answers. When confronted when some harsh truths, Hank finally does acknowledge reality and starts facing up to it.

Winters has done a nice job in these two books of building a believable scenario of what would happen if everyone on Earth knew that the end was coming, and I particularly like how the breakdown started on low heat in the first book and comes to a boil in this one. I’m very much looking forward to the third book and seeing how Winters wraps this story up.